SPAN 415 | Bitter Flavors of the Americas: Sugar, Coffee & Bananas

This course focuses on the exploitation of the land and the people of Latin America by the global agro-industrial complex, as seen through its literature. Students examine three novels that detail the power dynamics at play in the growing and harvesting of cash crops (in particular sugar, coffee, and bananas) grown in a plantation system exclusively for exportation. These narratives depict the basic tensions that both define and undermine their communities, and serve as allegories of the region's past and present. We read, discuss, and research these novels alongside other textual and cultural artifacts, as well as a corpus of contemporary scholarship, in order to understand both specific historical moments as well as the broader sociopolitical processes common to the region that we know today as Latin America. Central to the course is the power dynamics at play in the construction of historical narratives, racial justice, and collective memory; the systems of oppression that privilege certain stories while silencing others; the resistance to remembering a violent past that continues to shape the political present; and the potential of memory as a tool for resistance.